Zane Griffin Talley Cooper

It’s the most criminally underrated horror film of the 80s

Any tech that doesn’t help directly address ongoing genocides, income inequality, the climate crisis, and the rise of global fascism is nonsense and should not be funded.

As an aside, if any editor out there wants to pay me to write a piece on why measuring the immense social and environmental impacts of AI is getting us nowhere, and how we can reframe the discourse, I have a number of things brewing. Plus I’m poor and need some extra cash plzzzz.

Firsting in Research Firsting in research, then, is not about being first to a place, first to know something, first to discover something. It is a proclamation of power to make property in someone’s home, to put…

In regards to modes of extraction in grad school and western research practices, I’m gonna leave this here. @maxliboiron.bsky.social always has lessons to teach us about methods, research ethics, and how to produce (or at least endeavor to produce) just knowledge: discardstudies.com/2021/01/18/f...

As an aside, I’ve now noticed EBSCO providing AI summaries of its articles, which undermines the entire business model of academic publishing. This follows the death of close reading and how grad students are taught to read extractively. Why read any article ever again? Now we don’t have to!

In terms of art, there are SO many great artists thinking critically about AI and its place in society. @eryk.bsky.social is one I consistently recommend as an artist who sees value in expression through the kinds of ecosystems of noise through which AI models articulate. Fascinating work.

So talking about AI as a uniform technology that is doing stuff is asinine and baby discourse. Specific AI models designed for specific purposes. Flooding the FAA with AI doesn’t mean anything. What contracts/models/services/limitations/etc. ATM AI is just smoke connoting false political promises.

AI is not an object, a thing, or an intelligence. It is not even singular. It is a complex web of relations between hardware, software, human operators, energy production, resource extraction, political negotiations, Land (with a capital L), and the local ecosystem within which it’s deployed.

I could see Vibrant Matter used in an Anthropic whitepaper. Maybe it already has.

Might be a hot take, but: I engage with and find useful numerous aspects of New Materialism, but as a broad theoretical intervention, it sometimes feels like an AI model trained on black and indigenous thought that regurgitates it into concepts western academics can use and profit from.

Perhaps AI seems like such a natural boon to progress because, in some ways, it mimics the ultimately extractive nature of most of western research. The hoovering up of old ideas and centuries of deep thinking and relating in order to devise a new methodology or coin a new branded neologism.

I keep returning to @alexhanna.bsky.social’s provocation that AI is anti-process and I think that’s spot on. We need to be process-oriented luddites.

Don’t wanna read The Sound and the Fury? Extract the core ideas with AI. Never mind that the process of reading is most of the point.

Students already use AI to not read and write. Including these tools in canvas/blackboard institutionalizes the position that reading and writing don’t matter and, subsequently, neither does thinking. The AI model of education is fundamentally extractive. Take what you can, trash the rest.

The former explores the possibilities, limitations, and ethical dimensions of using AI in media production, while the latter is a management decision that, under the guise of efficiency and progress, will make education worse.

Analyzing and utilizing AI tools for video production, editing and graphic design are far different applications than providing AI summaries of readings in Canvas, or substituting hiring TAs for AI chatbots….

My thinking is that, long term, AI use at universities will become pretty narrow and specific, once an untold amount of damage is done by trying to force AI tools into every level of operation. AGI is not a thing. It’s management propaganda for the most part.

Maxine Berg shows how the “nimble fingers” stereotype first arose in the early Industrial Revolution as a way for managers to de-skill the labor of women workers. It was also used to exoticize labor of Navajo semiconductor manufacturers at Shiprock in the 60s. The term has a long sordid history.

It’s The Rizzler.

In addition to the plagiarism, energy use, and general deterioration of critical thinking, AI (as currently deployed) is a less an existential risk to humanity, and more a management ideology that begets extreme wealth consolidation and labor exploitation.

AI is a plagiarism engine built on stolen data, exploited labour, and enviro harm. Marketed as “intelligent,” it erodes critical thinking, empathy, and causes psychological harm. Run by authoritarian billionaires, it’s used for surveillance, profiling, and genocide—whether it works or makes up shit.

Notice they went with the RED lightsaber

Omg can’t wait for this!

So many people I could list here.
- Steve Jobs
- Thomas Edison
- Galton
- nearly every polar explorer
- Teddy Roosevelt
- Robert Noyce
- Obama

On and on

One student this semester kept insisting that this is the best things could ever be and that any change would be a “downgrade” in our standard of living. 😭

Absolutely! I do a whole exercise in my environmental media class where students have to imagine alternative energy/digital futures and it’s always the hardest assignment of the semester.

NFTs That Cost Millions Replaced With Error Message After Project Downgraded to Free Cloudflare Plan For a few hours, 19,000 NFTS that Nike helped mint returned a Cloudflare error instead of the picture people promised would live forever online.

🤌🤌🤌🤌 www.404media.co/nfts-that-co...

The Network State and Topological Fetishism in Greenland In his essay for our series “The Cloud is Dead,” D&S affiliate Zane Griffin Talley Cooper examines resource extraction in the Arctic and how fantasies of the Network State run counter to the reality o...

To quote @hypervisible.bsky.social, “Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.” But as I illustrate in my recent piece for @datasociety.bsky.social, alternative futures ARE being imagined. They just aren’t as easily exploitable datasociety.net/points/the-n...

This is a fantastic piece, and exactly what I try to impart to my students. Things can, and should be different. The first step in this long and arduous process is imagination, pure and simple.

The Network State and Topological Fetishism in Greenland In his essay for our series “The Cloud is Dead,” D&S affiliate Zane Griffin Talley Cooper examines resource extraction in the Arctic and how fantasies of the Network State run counter to the reality o...

I love how @zgtcooper.bsky.social uses his ethnographic work in Greenland to take down the vacuous concept of the Network State, which is so detached from land and the people who live in a place, with tech bros grafting AI generated crypto fascist nightmares onto topographies they don’t understand